


The Smell of Smoke

by Ponderosa (ponderosa121)



Category: B: The Beginning (Anime)
Genre: Dubious Consent, Love/Hate, M/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2018-08-03
Packaged: 2019-06-21 10:20:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15555603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ponderosa121/pseuds/Ponderosa
Summary: Keith had expected to learn more from this. Anything beyond laying bare his old weaknesses and the sums of his faults.





	The Smell of Smoke

The woodgrain of Gilbert’s desk spirals like fractals. The surface is glossy and smooth under Keith’s palms. There are no nicks, no cup stains, no careless scars from daily use. Everything about Gilbert is and has always been obsessively neat and tidy.

Gilbert’s palm skims down the length of Keith’s side, a slow and measured gesture. Keith fights a shiver, but his skin betrays him. At the same time, the ghostly trembles preserve the lie. As with extreme heat and extreme cold, some passions aren’t so dissimilar; if you go far enough in one direction, you end up where you began. Keith thinks of a torus--no, oroboros--then dismisses the idea. As twisted around each other as they are, as connected, they are not so simple a shape. Despite the devouring, they are a mobius strip.

“This must be why,” Gilbert says. His soft voice trails away with his touch.

“Why what?” Cheek plastered against the desk, Keith can’t see Gilbert’s smile. He knows it’s there, stretching that wide mouth wider as certain as gravity. The variable that remains is whether or not Gilbert cares enough to fake the emotion all the way to his eyes. 

“The reason why I--” Gilbert’s soft sigh stirs the hair at the nape of Keith’s neck. His hips lever forward to press him deeper. _Why I killed your sister._ “Why I crave cigarettes around you.”

When they were younger, they’d share a single cigarette after. Passing it back and forth as the sweat that clung to their bodies evaporated. Half the time the cigarette would end up falling to ash between Keith’s fingers, too sated to care if it burnt to the filter while Gilbert watched, hungering.

Keith doesn’t feel like a smoke right now but he still harbors cravings of his own. Lunch had been cold and quick from the convenience store. What he wants is curry that reminds him of winter: steaming and thick with root vegetables, topped with an egg still soft and quivering. He wants a stiff drink over ice with a bit of kick to follow the chill. He wants Gilbert to hurry up and finish. He wants to come.

He had expected to learn more from this. Anything beyond laying bare his old weaknesses and the sums of his faults.

What is it that Gilbert feels? Keith discards the bigger philosophic question for the simple and straightforward. In the literal, Gilbert’s hands on him are tender and searching, the skin beneath his touch bearing all the scars that the flawless desk does not. There’s the knife wound on Keith’s hip, the ugly burrowing scar from the bullet that had grazed his ribs, the countless marks and minor bruises that bear witness to his own carelessness. Keith finds formulas in the swirling wood, just as surely as Gilbert finds some meaning in the map of his skin.

“Do you remember the time we were caught in the conservatory?” Keith asks. He closes his eyes as the memory overtakes him. It’d been his hands on Gilbert then. The smell of blooming flowers had filled the air like syrup, while beneath it, the pungent odor of freshly-spread manure filtered up.

“I remember.”

Keith doesn’t voice the other questions that hang in the air around him now: _Was that the moment when your fixation shifted? When you stopped caring about possessing me and cared only about possessing her?_

A hot stain embarrassment floods into his neck. Shame still lingers even though Erika is dead and the dead couldn’t care the slightest about fleeting things like stumbling in on one’s big brother and his best friend screwing like rabbits.

“You’d been so certain at the time that no one ever trespassed there,” Gilbert says. He sounds wistful, and he presses closer as if seeking comfort, as if _granting_ it.

Gilbert drops a kiss at the peak of Keith’s spine, follows it with his tongue and the sharp, scraping edge of his teeth. It drives Keith mad, these simple things that Gilbert knows will trip the nerves that go straight to his dick. How loathsome it is—he is—that he still enjoys this enough to be hard and jumping under Gilbert’s touch. 

He’d never factored in interruption because it had never occurred to Keith that _they_ were the ones who always trespassed there. That eventually his sister would come looking for them when they kept sneaking off. He’d factored in everything but the disruption he’d caused. That he had been the pebble in the stream.

He writhes under Gilbert, overloaded with sensation and loathing and desire and it still not being enough. Not yet, not quite. The slow drag of Gilbert’s cock is a promise, while the constant sweeping touches that skirt his vital organs are another, uglier vow. Or are they a confession? Is Keith making his own confession, prostrate as he is upon this altar of glossy wood?

“I was certain of many things in my youth,” Keith says, after a time. He reaches an arm back, grasping for Gilbert, a gesture that tries to convey that the pretense of comfort given had meant something to him. He can’t tell if he’s successful, or if again he’s simply failing to include the consequences of his actions into the whole of the equation.

I am the pebble in the pond, Keith thinks, as pleasure eats him from the inside out, bubbling up from his soul like foul water.

His eyes close and fractals dance in the dark. His fingers twitch for a cigarette.


End file.
